I feel sorry for atheists and this is particularly true on the National Day of Prayer, May 6th. Curiously, almost every atheist I know has read the Old and New Testaments from cover to cover, apparently looking for a loophole.

I suspect that the earliest ancestors of modern man were praying in their caves and on their savannas. Prayer comes as naturally to our lips as a kiss.

Thinking about prayer led me to conclude that what we call prayer today is yet another gift of the Jews, one that preceded the gift of a messiah to Christians, even if Jews prefer to wait for one.

“The Jew gave us the Outside and the Insideâ€”our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in factâ€”new, adventure, surprise, unique, individual, person, vocation, time, history, future, freedom, progress, spirit, faith, hope, justiceâ€”are the gifts of the Jews.” — Thomas Cahill, Irish Author.

Adin Steinsaltz, writing in â€śThe Essential Talmudâ€? notes that, â€śIn the First Temple era, prayer was entirely spontaneous; when a man felt the need to petition his God or thank Him, he prayed in his own words.â€? However, the â€śformal regulation of prayer had already commenced; the first psalms had been composed and were sung by the Levites on special occasions in the Temple, so the general public was aware of the existence of certain official prayer ceremonies that took place at fixed times.â€?

â€śThe need for a recognized version of prayers became pressing at the beginning of the Second Temple era. â€ś Having returned from a long exile in Babylonia, the Jews had only sparse knowledge of the Hebrew language and of basic concepts of Judaism. â€śWhen they wanted to pray, they lacked both language and content.â€? As a result a Great Assembly was held and out of that came the decision to compose a standard prayer. It was composed of eighteen benedictions.

Much of this official prayer has survived to this day and it should escape no one that the Jews and Judaism have survived as well. And not just survived, but returned in our lifetimes to rebuild Israel as the worldâ€™s only Jewish state. No one with any knowledge of history and a sense of a greater power at work in the affairs of men can ignore the significance of this.

Olive Schreiner, a South African novelist and social activist, wrote: “Indeed it is difficult for all other nations of the world to live in the presence of the Jews. It is irritating and most uncomfortable. The Jews embarrass the world as they have done things which are beyond the imaginable. They have become moral strangers since the day their forefather, Abraham, introduced the world to high ethical standards and to the fear of Heaven.â€?

â€śThey brought the world the Ten Commandments, which many nations prefer to defy. They violated the rules of history by staying alive, totally at odds with common sense and historical evidence. They outlived all their former enemies, including vast empires such as the Romans and the Greeks. They angered the world with their return to their homeland after 2000 years of exile and after the murder of six million of their brothers and sisters.â€?

Christian Americans, increasingly feeling the sting of rejection, ridicule, and efforts to isolate them, now have more reason than ever to identify with and understand the centuries of oppression Jews endured.

Jews will join in the National Day of Prayer and no doubt they will regard it as a good thing, having bequeathed a heritage of the earliest prayers and having institutionalized prayer to make it available to all, inside or outside of the temple.

Some posts simply beg to be re-posted. They need to be seen by as many readers as possible. Once again, Alan Caruba ofWarning Signsprovides such a post. I give you:

Guests of Vlad the Impaler

By Alan Caruba

Lately I have been reading and hearing a lot of psychoanalysis of Barack Hussein Obama and it reflects a growing need by pundits and regular folks to figure him out.

The reason is obvious. We are all now the guests of Vlad the Impaler, version 2.0.

As several million unemployed already know, he doesnâ€™t give a ratâ€™s patoot about what itâ€™s like to not have a salary, not have health care coverage, and not be able to make the mortgage or car payment.

Having been abandoned by his birth father, his step-father, and finally by his mother, Barack figured out how to bottle up all that anger, put on a happy face, and pay back America for failing him.

Obama has lived a virtually invisible life whereby no one who ever attended college with him recalls him. He taught at the University of Chicago and not one student has ever come forward to acknowledge having been in one of his classes. Among the friends he did choose, all shared a common theme of hatred for America. If there is a paper trail, it has been carefully sequestered, out of reach, sealed.

Less than a year and a half into his first and, hopefully, last term, all the polls including those of the mainstream media show that people donâ€™t merely â€śdisapproveâ€? of his performance in office, they are seriously worried whether he should even be in office.

If you donâ€™t like America, Barack Hussein Obama knows exactly how you feel and why.

All this was on display throughout the campaign, up to and including delusions of grandeur and omnipotence that in any other setting would have instantly identified him as a mental case. â€śYes, we canâ€? shouted the crowd.

What they got, however, was the biggest collection of left-wing nut-jobs one could gather in one spot; most of them designated â€śczarsâ€? and exempt from any investigation by Congress.

Communists, dedicated socialists, weird â€śscientistsâ€? who think reducing the population is the only way to save the Earth; others who think we should abandon all the traditional and known energy sources that keep the lights on and the cars rolling in favor of windmills, solar panels; and bicycles. You know, crazy people!

We got a kind of machine politics that hasnâ€™t been seen in Washington, D.C. since the early days and years of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration when the Great Depression so frightened people they were willing to watch the federal government expand in ways that were never intended. From time to time, the Supreme Court would staunch the flood of horrid legislation. FDRâ€™s answer was to try to â€śpackâ€? the court by expanding it.

Today, we have witnessed a Democrat-controlled Congress that just passed a huge â€śreformâ€? of the nationâ€™s healthcare industries, effectively destroying the relative handful of insurance companies that provided coverage.

With healthcare now under government control and virtually every other commercial and financial activity to suffer the same fate, it is only time before everyone will be issued an ID card to control everything one does.

Where in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to literally own an automobile manufacturer destroyed by its own unions? An insurance company that was so big it was not allowed to fail despite billions in bad transactions? Why, in fact, is the federal government in the business of buying and selling housing mortgages?

For most of the beginning of his first year in office, Obama was everywhere on television, granting interviews to reporters who listened in amazement at his detachment from the reality of the economy. â€śAre you punch drunk?â€? asked Steve Kroft of Sixty Minutes. Bret Beir of Fox News fought to keep him focused on the questions being asked.

People swiftly noticed he could not speak extemporaneously. Without the Tele-Prompters, he lost the aura of being all knowing and all seeing. It became a joke. A response to a simple question about taxes recently elicited a rambling 17-minute â€śanswerâ€? that made everyone listening wonder why he could not deliver a simple answer.

The British, when they still ruled the American colonies, learned to their displeasure what a bad idea it is to pick a fight with patriots.

By the time the Revolution began the colonies had been running their own affairs for a long time and, while many saw benefits in being allied with one of the great powers of their times and their world, they soon tired of â€śtaxation without representation.â€?

The colonists had no say in Parliament and generally regarded it, not the king, as the source of their problems. The British, however, had spent themselves into huge debt by pursuing various wars. Parliament saw the colonies as a source of revenue with which to dig themselves out of that debt. One way was to monopolize what the colonies could import and another way was to tax those imports.

The problem for the British was the long established practice of Americans to ignore any legislation or taxes they did not like. Decades before the Revolution ignited, a British official named Edward Randolph wrote â€śThere is no notice taken of the act of navigation, plantation, or any other laws made in England for the regulation of trade. All nations having free liberty to come into their ports and vend their commodities without any restraintâ€¦â€? Apparently, Randolph noted, Americans regarded themselves as â€śa free state and do act in all matters accordingly.â€?

We tend to see men like Sam Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere through the gauzy haze of a distant time, but we should remind ourselves that they were real men trying to cope with an increasingly difficult situation.

Their grievances were real and they had grown up in a place where liberty, the freedom to worship as they wanted, to publish what they wanted, and engage in commerce as they wanted was not only well established, but valued above all else. They had a good understanding of the British constitution and the rights it granted. It was Britain, far across the Atlantic, that controlled their fortunes and, through a series of abuses, Britain lost their allegiance.

The importance of tea cannot be underestimated. By 1769, Americans were importing 900,000 pounds of English tea, but by 1773 that was not longer the case, in large part due to the Tea Act of 1773. It was a tax specific to the colonies. Americans began to boycott tea. Coffee would come to be seen as a more patriotic brew to drink.

Adams, Hancock, Revere, and others had formed the Sons of Liberty, a group that on December 16, 1773 boarded three ships from England, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, and dumped 342 crates of tea into Boston Harbor.

The event would become known as the Boston Tea Party and from that event todayâ€™s Tea Party members take their name. The source of oppressive taxes, unimaginable waste, and unpopular legislation is now the federal government in Washington, D.C.

Such events and groups do not occur in a vacuum. They are preceded by earlier abuses and in the case of the colonies there was a Stamp Act that was so strongly resisted Parliament repealed it. In Massachusetts, the royal governor and other officials appointed by the king were so unpopular that they were frequently under attack. Effigies were hung from an elm in North Boston that became known as the Liberty Tree.

There can be few more foolish acts by any government in power than to ignore Americans, to force upon them legislation the majority opposes, to bring shame to the nation in various ways. Patient to a fault, Americans have a long track record of opposing oppression that runs contrary to the U.S. Constitution.

By coincidence, I have been reading Joel J. Millerâ€™s excellent biography, â€śThe Revolutionary Paul Revere.â€? Made famous by a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, â€śPaul Revereâ€™s Rideâ€?, Revere had made a long ride the night of the Tea Party to inform the New York Committee of Correspondence about the event. Another rode to Philadelphia for the same purpose. The ride immortalized by Longfellow was â€śOn the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five.â€?

Paul Revere, silversmith and patriot, lived to the age of 83, dying in May 1818; long enough a life to encompass the tempestuous birth of America in its earliest years. He would live through the Revolution, the original Articles of Confederation, and in 1787, the Constitution under which Americans live today, still enjoying the blessings of liberty.

In Boston, the church bells tolled his passing. One newspaper said, â€śSeldom has the tomb closed upon a life so honorable and useful.â€?

The spirit of Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty still lives. America is home again to Tea Parties.

This work is under copyright by Alan Caruba and is re-produced here, in it’s entirety, with the permission of the author, Alan Caruba. To use this piece, please contact Mr. Caruba to obtain his permission.